John Walsh writes: | John Chambers writes: | | >One of the cuter illustrations of this: There's an old test | >for telling whether someone is a scientist/engineer or one | >of those humanities types. You ask them "If you call a tail | >a leg, how many legs does a dog have?" | | >The answer, of course, is "Four, because calling a tail a | >leg doesn't make it one." (At which point the humanities | >types all get indignant. ;-) | | Unless they're historians, in which case they say, | "Yep, that's a good ole Abe Lincoln story."
Yeah, but there are plenty of older attributions, including (of course) Ben Franklin. Because he published them, he got credit for lots of clever sayings that he took from others. I remember it being used in classes in both mathematical logic and linguistics as an introduction to a serious topic in both fields, the confusion over whether language is arbitrary (which is obviously true) or whether words can have a precise meaning (which is also obviously true). This all comes together in the growing field of computer communications. It's basically true that the languages that computers use to exchange information are inherently arbitrary. But as with any other language, you need agreement on the syntax and semantics, or you can't have communication. We've seen this occasionally in abc, of course. We've had a few suggestions of alternative ways of encoding music. People have posted pseudo-abc to a few lists that do things like putting the lengths before the notes, using '/' or 'I' for bar lines, and so on. And some programs implement variants such as using '!' for staff breaks. All of these would work just as well as the (semi)standard way that abc does it. But if the software doesn't agree on what pieces of the notation mean, it can sorta interfere with getting the music across. And abc has a quandary that's common in all other kinds of computer communications: You find something that can't be expressed using the standard language. What do you do? What we've done in abc is actually what has been done in lots of other computer standards. Start with a rule "Any notation you don't understand should be ignored (perhaps with a warning but not a fatal error message)". Then new ideas can be tried out in isolation, and the new things shouldn't bother existing software (aside from users seeing a few warning messages). When a small crowd finds something that seems to solve the problem, they present what they've done to the general population. A debate ensues, usually settling down to "Who needs it?" versus "We do". Eventually most of the new ideas get incorporated into the standard language. But, since this requires cooperation among a group of humans, it usually happens slowly. Alternatively, they don't get incorporated, and you get a collection of dialects or a family of very similar but incompatible languages. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
